Livia: Or Buried Alive is the second in a "quincunx" of novels that [Durrell] began with Monsieur several years ago and that promises to become a tour de force rivaling The Alexandria Quartet. Concerned about fiction, particularly the novel, in a post-Einsteinian, post-Freudian age, Durrell makes a novelist a major character in his novels, someone writing about other characters who know what he is doing and who reflect, as the novelist does, upon what he has written. At times all this becomes a bit confusing, but the device provides several more or less simultaneous angles of vision, or rather different dimensions, in both time and space, for the action or events of the novels.

The novels may also provide different angles of vision, or dimensions of experience, for each other. Like Monsieur, Livia opens with the death of a close friend but proceeds almost at once to a conversation between Blanford, the novelist and narrator in this book, and Robin Sutcliffe, the novelist in Monsieur, which both men claim to have written and have given different titles (Sutcliffe's is The Prince of Darkness). Their talk quickly gets around to discussion of two principal female characters: Pia, Sutcliffe's wife in Monsieur, whom Blanford has taken, in part, as a model for Livia, his wife in this novel, after making certain changes in her character and representation. They argue considerably about these differences between the two women and wives, noting their strengths and inadequacies as characters, and in the process informing the reader a great deal about themselves as husbands and novelists. Durrell claims that each of the novels in the quincunx will be independent of each other, though "roped together like climbers on a rockface," as Blanford, "squinting round the curves of futurity," describes them; they will be dependent upon each other "as echoes might be," not "laid end to end in serial order, like dominoes." But there are more than echoes that connect the first two novels; the first fifty pages of Livia lose, if not much of their intelligibility, then most of their point unless one has read Monsieur. It is one thing to recognize Lord Galen in Livia as an "echo" of Banquo, the wealthy banker of Monsieur; it is quite another to understand how Livia develops from Pia, Sylvie, and Sabine. Similarly, major locales resemble and differ from each other, as do incidents. If each novel enjoys its own integrity, as claimed, then each one also gains something from the other. Thus the whole group when it is finished may provide a means of viewing not only the same experience from different perspectives, but also different experiences that are related, especially the experiences of love (in all its varieties), death, and the nature of evil. At the same time, we may get further evidence of how a writer views his own work, even in the midst of writing it, particularly in the lively and sometimes whimsical style of an original and masterful novelist, which Durrell is. (pp. 231-32)